>Last Tuesday I noted that, among other things, I was hoping to increase my Gamerscore by 10,000 points over my total at the end of 2007:

I started the year at 28788; I am currently at 37403. There’s still 6 weeks left in the year, so I still have time to make it to an even 10,000 point swing.

I certainly made up a lot of ground over the last few days; by my calculation, I’ve gained 1075 Points in less than a week, which means I’ve only got 310 more to go.

At least 600 points came from Scene It: BOS, which doles out the points like they’re going out of style. (My wife likes playing the Scene It games, which means I buy them as soon as they come out.) I like this new game a lot; it uses Avatars, which make them seem a little less pointless, everything’s gotten a nice graphical make-over, and they seem to have a healthy obsession with Simon Pegg, which is OK with me. The only real problem with the game are the announcers, who are even more horrible than they were in the last game; I mean, they’re FUCKING HORRIBLE. Thank God there’s an option to mute them.

A few more achievements came from Fallout 3, but that game should not be played for points AT ALL. I was all set to name GTA4 as my Game of the Year, but I have to say that every hour I spend with Fallout 3 makes that decision a little less concrete. I’m about halfway to level 10, and I’m probably going to stay away from the main quest for a little while longer and work on some side stuff. There is so much to see in this game, and the level of detail is simply staggering. Perfect example: I was doing one of the very first sidequests in the game, which required me to go to this bombed out town and pick up some mines; while I was there, I decided to break into some houses and see what there was to loot. And each house that I broke into featured this little unspoken short story of each family’s last moments – one house in particular had a pair of skeletons lying in bed holding each other, and it actually made me stop for a second and think about what I was actually seeing. What I love about Fallout 3 is this deeper notion of history; everything you’re looting is stuff that belonged to a different time and place – and, well, it belonged to a human being who died. Not many games are able to convey that sense of a lived-in world very well – even Bioshock struggled with it at times.

What else, what else… oh, well, yeah. I caved and bought Tomb Raider: Underworld, mostly because Gamefly kept pushing it back and when I checked Sunday morning, it was slated to ship this coming Tuesday, which is bullshit. My initial reaction is pretty much par for the course: it’s Legend with a gorgeous new coat of paint and a really shitty camera. I’m in the Mexico level (which is, I think, the third level if you don’t count the prologue), and it’s got a wierd non-linear progression which is actually a little annoying, to be honest – Tomb Raider games shouldn’t be sandbox-y. I’m also missing the Croft Manor exploration level that’s been a favorite feature of mine in the last 2 games, although considering that the very first thing you see in the game is the Manor exploding, it probably makes sense that it’s missing. (Maybe it’s unlocked after you finish the game?)

Played a tiny little bit of Left 4 Dead; that game is awesome and I need to give it another go.

Oh yeah, also played a bit of A Kingdom For Keflings, which I think I really only downloaded to be eligible for some stupid contest. It’s basically a super-lite strategy game, with Avatar support; it’s actually a decent time-suck, although I’m not sure how much time I’m going to spend with it. I’ll probably finish one game and then go back to Civ Rev for my strategy needs.